WWII crash site in the Nethertlands (re-circlated from military.com forum)

DABANSHEE

Banned
Dec 8, 1999
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"Being a UN veteran myself, I would like to take the liberty to bring the attached news item, in translated form, to your attention. The Dutch Veterans community, from WWII vintage through the recent NATO and UN-operations, is seeking support to reverse the decision by a local municipality to deny two fallen Canadian liberators a decent burial. We consider this a matter of honour. It is a bit embarrassing indeed that we would have to look for help across the horizon again, but I am confident that any US Veteran would agree with the basic issue. Indeed, we are alerting the general public in the Netherlands as well. Dismay about this shameless affair is growing.
We would be very grateful if you gave this item the necessary circulation. The daily in question gives full backing of the Dutch Veterans' initiative, by among others, publishing international reactions ( to: evgilst@telegraaf.nl ). It may even make sense to send a comment directly to the municipality concerned: bestuur@derondevenen.nl

With thanks and the best wishes for the New Year,

Thomas Milo
Amsterdam
Captain (ret'd) Royal Netherlands Army

t.milo@chello.nl
http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc17/b004.html



<< From the Dutch Daily De Telegraaf Saturday 30 December 2000.
Canadian Relatives? Plea Shrugged Off by Local Authorities(at the municipality of De Ronde Venen)
By WIM KROESE(translated by Thomas Milo, RNLA veteran of UNIFIL, Lebanon 1980-83)
Mijdrecht, Saturday. In the eyes of the casual young bicyclist passing on the beautiful track from Wilnis to Mijdrecht, there?s nothing unusual about the green meadows and the adjacent ditch. With the possible exception of the seasonal geese whose Christmas days are numbered.
Yet, since 5 May 1943 a Vickers Wellington Mk II bomber is hidden under this green with the remains of two of its five crewmembers, Joseph White and Adrian Thibaudeau crushed inside the wreckage in the bog. That much is certain.
The local authorities, backed by a marginal majority in the municipal council, categorically refuse to take seriously the pleas of the relatives to identify the two fallen men. 57 years and 7 month on, both Canadians are still booked as Missing In Action. This constitutes an outrage for a country like ours that owes so much to its liberators.
Joseph White?s Brother, Samuel (73) of Thorold, Ontario, Writes to us: ?Alluding to the well-known ?September Song? from the musical about Peter Stuyvesant by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson, two recent strokes took me to the December of my life. I now no longer believe I can win the struggle against these Dutch bigwigs for a decent Christian grave for my brother.?
When I pass away, these administrators of yours shall continue to play the old game of drawing it out until the memory of the Wellington affair has faded. And that will be the end of it.
Even today, the wreckages of just under 2000 warplanes remain hidden in Dutch soil. 400 of them are still presumed to contain the human remains of their crews. The state of the Netherlands, as a signatory to the 12 August 1949 Geneva Convention on Humanitarian War Legislation, took upon itself the obligation to excavate the remains of any missing combatant whenever they are located and, if so requested by the relatives, to repatriate them. Last spring Sam White put forward such a request addressed to Frank de Grave, the Dutch Minister of Defence. Adrian Thibaudeau?s sister from St Eustach, Quebec, was so upset by the attitude she met of the Dutch authorities, that by now she wishes all of us into the same bog.This appalling lack of respect on the part of the Dutch authorities, fortunately, is not typical. In the Amsterdam area alone some three bombers, including a Wellington, were dug up and the human remains contained in them were properly interred.
The under-Minister of Defence, mr H.A.L. van Hoof offered the prosperous industrial municipality of Ronde Venen consisting of Wilnis, Mijdrecht and the wealthy residential village of Vinkeveen, substantial guaranties to contribute to the costs, which total around NLG 365.000 (£100.000) excl VAT. He also offered the services of the recovery and identification teams of the Royal Netherlands Army and Air Force.
Already a sum of NLG 80.000 guilders has been raised by a foundation set up by about 200 private individuals, including several eyewitnesses of this tragic event. Several WWII veterans and an industrialist have committed themselves to donate considerable contributions. The well-known art dealer Krikhaar plans to auction a number of his paintings, arguing that for any liberated Dutchman this is a matter of honour. However, these civil initiatives and the pleas of the Canadian families meet with unwillingness of the municipality of De Ronde Venen to take any action. The breaking point is a long drawn out petty financial argument: a contribution of no more then NLG 5 (£1.5) per inhabitant.
By this ratio the municipality of De Ronde Venen is obliged to spend NLG 130,000 instead of the NLG 50,000 it has offered.
Dick Boogaard, the Mayor, refuses to increase the contribution, as he has no confidence in the financial promises made by the government. And also, because the Municipality will have to advance the full amount of the recovery costs and will remain responsible for any collateral damage. This is a moot point indeed, as the wreckage rests near a salt-water source. When questioned by the Parliamentary Defence Committee about the embarrassing Wellington Affair, Defence under-Minister van Hoof said, that the central government is unable and unwilling to reverse this local municipality?s decision, in case it refuses to take action.
Return flight
The embarrassing episode of the two missing Wellington crewmembers began 0230hr in the black, moonless night of 4 to 5 May 1943. The lone straggler, now on its way back to a RAF bomber station near Dalton in Yorkshire, dropped out of the main bomber stream while returning from a massed attack on Dortmund by 600 British and Canadian aircraft. After the war, Hodmott, one of the two captured survivors of the crash, remembers how the navigator reported to pilot Bob Moulton: ?The North Sea is just 90 seconds? flying ahead?. There the plane would have left behind the barrier of lead-and-explosives-spewing German flak defences that permeated the Western part of the Netherlands.
At that very moment the fate of these two Canadians in their last night of war over Europe was sealed, along with that of their pilot, Bob Moulton ? whose surviving brother lives in Brocckville, Ontario,
In England, the returning crews were to be welcomed with a full breakfast, a hot shower, a bed and letters from their loved ones. They would spend the day playing billiards, drinking a pint at the nearest pub, or possibly follow some course or rehearse formation flying, far away from the war.
At dusk the next day they would be ordered to fly another sortie into the evil Nazi Empire. But now this twin-engine Wimpey was caught between two searchlights near Schiphol military airfield (the site of today?s bustling airport of Amsterdam). Hit by flak, the German anti-aircraft artillery, the coned Canadian aircraft breaks into flames.
Or maybe it was the Junkers Ju88 night fighter on the tail of the Canadians that finished them off.
The noise of the on-going air battle wakes up eyewitness P.C. van Leeuwen, 16 at the time, and he gets out of his bed. Likewise do the brothers Ton and Herman van Soest and local sexton and resistance-member Jan van Vliet. From close by they watch the Wellington turn gently, its tail burning. Moulton shouts out to his crew his last order before dying: ?Bale out, now!?
The Wellington dives straight into the bog, right next to a now long-gone hay-drying barn. Bob Moulton?s body is recovered by the young Dutchmen. They find the pilot ripped apart beside the lugubriously burning wreckage of the Wellington. The next day the bog swallows up all that remains of the plane. Van Leeuwen still treasures one silk pilot?s glove with an embroidered RAF emblem, along with a brass tunic-button marked ?'E. Gill Birmingham?. The Unicorn-cum-lion-decorated buttons were only sewn onto officer?s uniforms. Before the Germans arrive, the four Dutchmen hurriedly bury all the human remains. When the German occupying troops find pilot Bob Moulton?s dog-tag, they rebury him properly in Wilnis in a grave that has been maintained as a memorial ever since. Crewmembers Hoddinott and Carter manage to parachute to safety. But after the crash evading capture turns out impossible; the surroundings are still swarming with Germans. Both survived captivity, but neither of them ever mentioned their wartime experiences, as they consider such boasting (&quot;shooting a line&quot;) not done.
A leaking ditch
In the post-war debriefing of survivors Hoddinott and Carter it transpired that their comrades White en Thibaudeau had been unable to wrestle themselves free from the burning tail of the Wellington bomber. They drowned when the cavity caused by the impact slowly turned into a large bubbling pond as one of the wings had crashed through a dike. Alerted Dutch helplessly watch the wreckage disappear until the Germans arrive and chase them away.
In 1946 the RAF is forced to abort an attempt to recover the wreckage due to lack of proper equipment. Although the remains rest on a solid layer of sand at 5 meters below the surface, the thick mud on top makes digging it up impossible. The hole marking the failed attempt is filled in with refuse. During the following decades cows graze on top of the 428th squadron Wellington.
On May 6 1943, the day after the crash, Joseph?s mother is informed that her son is missing in action as his plane has crashed into the North Sea. Until her very death in 1965 she bitterly blamed herself for having signed the document that allowed her son to volunteer for RAF service in Europe. His surviving brother knows that Joseph, still too young to join up, talked his mother into falsifying his age.
After the war, the military authorities forget to inform the families of the two men that they hadn?t landed in the North Sea but on the Continent. Consequently the relatives never submitted a formal request to the Netherlands for identification of these casualties, until very recently. But having done so doesn?t relieve their grief, as the authorities chose to ignore it. A cowardly and stingy attitude of a City Council that only sees it as a financial burden to be avoided.
Today the plot is no longer a meadow, but plain grassland. The land has been sold and will get a new destination.
A project developer intends to establish a recreation park here, in accordance the local policy of preserving the natural environment. As there is also squabbling about building holiday villas, it is obvious that, whatever the outcome, this is going to be quite profitable for the Council.
?Get these Canadians out of this crash site and bury them properly along with their fallen comrades!? This is the message to the municipal and central authorities in the Netherlands, sent by the trustees Van Loo and Rouwenhorst of the ?Foundation for the Recovery of the 1943 Vickers Wellington?. But to no avail. Van Loo received piles of letters signed by well-known Dutch politicians, like Dijkstal (Home Secretary and former RNAF officer), Voorhoeve (former minister of Defence), Van den Doel and others subscribing to the idea that both Canadians deserve a positive identification.
They even took the matter to court, but the judge did not find the council at fault in their approach of the matter. The incriminations are taking a more personal turn now. The Mayor of the municipality De Ronde Venen, Dick Boogaard, publicly calls the trustees ?troublemakers? whose endless complaining he finds tiring. Mr A J G Spoelstra, spokesman for the CDA (Christian Democrat Party), council member and general practioner, states that to him it doesn?t make any difference whether the old Wellington moves a few yards under the bog or not?. ?They have a war grave, don?t they?? he reposts the relatives who are crying out loud for positive identification of their war dead.
Wartime flyers
Even the Canadian military attach&eacute; in the Hague, colonel De Valliere, who gives full backing to the initiative, is frustrated by administrative non-cooperation. And the Wellington Mk II affair is not an isolated case. In the case of earlier discoveries, the Netherlands Ministry of Defence refused to recover human remains of wartime flyers, as soon as it had satisfied itself that no stray bombs would be found near the buried wreckage. In one case this triggered such an angry diplomatic response from the US government, that recovery work was resumed immediately. Apparently the Canadians haven?t been able to press the right political button yet.
In the past accountant JCK van Loo and teacher J Rouwenhorst forced the municipal council to erect a monument for the Jewish victims of WWII and they haven?t given up yet on this cause. ?The municipal council acts against the policy that places the obligation to recover squarely with the government. And moreover, Joseph White?s brother is not going to withdraw his request to identify these wartime remains. We hope to be able to get him over here to participate in the Liberation Day Celebrations in Wilnis on 5 May 2001.?
The alternative is that, failing proper recovery, unsuspecting parents in the near future will let their children play on top of the Wellington Mk II with Joseph and Adrian still inside it. Two barely grown-up boys up who were to meet with their death in our struggle for peace on earth. Into the bogs?
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Well he requested that he wants it circulated, but it is a bit long (not that that has stopped me before.